John Patrick says some good things about blogs and business:

So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before.

People won't go to the company intranet to search for information. Instead, they'll look in blogs see what people they trust and respect have to say. The company intranet simply doesn't have that kind of credibility, nor ever will at many companies. Further, blogs aren't old, like an HTML document that's been there since 1997. Instead, blogs are very likely to be something that interests [the blogger] greatly. Bloggers are writing all the time about what's current in various contexts and subject categories. Blogs are off-the-cuff, candid, real—and now.

He doesn't really say anything that most people using blogs for both providing and getting information don't already know, but it's something that can be said over and over because many people still don't get it:

I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

I like to think of blogging as a new way to communicate. And there are many ways to think about this. Some people like to say this enables everybody to be a publisher. In fact, a lot of people said that about the Web back in 1994 and 1995—that it's a document-publishing phenomenon and that now, everybody can publish. In theory, that was true—but only if you knew HTML and if you knew how to set up a Web server and a lot of other ifs. What's new with blogging is that anybody can do it.